Forty-four summers ago, Creedence Clearwater Revival played the Woodstock festival in upstate New York. The band didn’t take the stage until after midnight Saturday, Aug. 16, 1969, because the Grateful Dead — unsurprisingly — played a long set. CCR drummer Doug Clifford remembers the night well.

“The people were wet, cold and shivering, but they were still naked, covered with mud and smiling,” he said in a recent phone interview from his Reno home. “We had no sense of how big it was going to be historically. We were just in the moment. Who would have possibly known?”

Fast forward to 2013 and Clifford, now a grandfather, still plays drums for CCR, although the R now stands for Revisited. Along with founding CCR member Stu Cook on bass and new members Kurt Griffey, Steve Gunner and John Tristao, Creedence Clearwater Revisited has been performing as a group for the past 19 years, significantly longer than the six-year run enjoyed by the original band.

Still, the group, which performs tonight at the Silver Legacy, hasn’t forgotten about the hits from a time when the quartet was rounded out by the late Tom Fogerty and his brother, John.

“We pretty much stay with the hits,” Clifford said. “We’ve tried putting in more obscure songs to mix it up a little, but we’ve found from an entertainer’s perspective, we have a real set program right now. It’s pretty tough, when you have legitimate hit records, to throw in an album track. We’ve kind of figured it out.”

Bay Area natives Clifford and Cook met 55 years ago in high school and have been playing together ever since. When Clifford moved to Incline Village in the ’90s, Cook followed, and their jam sessions turned into a full-time job that now consists of 75 tour dates a year.

“We were jamming in my studio with bass and drums,” Clifford said. “Now, this is our 19th year. It’s amazing. I could see us doing less as time rolls on and as grandkids keep coming.”

Clifford, a “Decliner,” as people who move from North Lake Tahoe to Reno are often called, said he prefers things in the Biggest Little City.

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“I like that there’s a lot more to do here,” he said. “And I’m still in the mountains, so I still have that.”

The original CCR was known for hits such as “Suzie Q” with Clifford’s hypnotic drum beat, while songs like “Fortunate Son” became the unofficial soundtrack to the Vietnam War.

“We were definitely against the war,” Clifford said. “Mainly it was the draft. ‘Fortunate Son’ is about the inequities of who went and who didn’t. Daddy would find a way to get the rich kids out of the war, while the middle class and working class did the dirty work. I was fortunate enough to get into the Coast Guard Reserve as a football player when there was a two-year waiting list to get in.”

Clifford said CCR enjoyed a unique position as both a protest band and a popular group that spoke to the mainstream.

“We didn’t like what was going on, and a lot of our music was about that,” he said. “A lot of protest bands didn’t get anywhere because they were preaching to the choir and the choir was very small, but we were able to get to the masses. We had hit records about that commentary, and that was a pretty big deal.”